Fall 2025 update from CIS

New faces at CIS

We have some new people joining CIS.

Bianca Jaramillo joined us on October 16, taking a Technical Analyst position in the User Support group.  Bianca joins us after a 7.5 year stint with Apple. She’s already proving to be a great addition to the User Services team in all three of their core areas: Help Desk, AV support and technical support.

Nic Dodds will take up the position of Research Computing Specialist on our Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS) team on December 1. Nic comes highly recommended by our colleagues in the Computer Science department, where he helped pilot course and research server improvements as Course Technology Coordinator. He joins us at a time when additional high-performance computing resources are becoming available to faculty and students.  A special note of thanks to the many faculty who helped us redesign this position and especially to the four faculty who interviewed candidates: Eduardo Ibarra Garcia Padilla, Jamie Haddock, Maduka Ogba and Calden Wloka.

We currently have an open position for an infrastructure and systems administrator and hope to make an announcement about that one soon.  We also plan to post one more position in Core Technology Services.

Please welcome Bianca and congratulate Nic when you see them around campus!

New Programs

I’d like to take the opportunity to mention some new initiatives we started this Fall.

The CIS liaisons program provides a way for CIS to connect with academic departments on a regular basis.  We’ve appointed two CIS staff per department as liaisons. They have each visited at least once this semester with their respective departments and collected quite a bit of actionable feedback. Their next step is to work with the IT staff in departments that have one, strengthening the connections even more. I look forward to seeing what this program brings us in the Spring semester. 

We have updated the computer upgrade program (CUP) in response to feedback. The total amount of funding for CUP has been increased by the College and we’ve streamlined and simplified the program.  We look forward to gathering feedback from this year’s participants once all the new computers have been rolled out. 

In October we activated passkeys (also known as passwordless options) in Duo. This greatly reduces the number of times you have to reach for your phone as a second factor when authenticating, but is no less secure.  Some of the responses from the MISO survey last Spring indicated dissatisfaction with two factor authentication: we hope that this step toward “passwordless” will help.

In another new initiative, we are launching a series of “Drop in presentations and sessions” (DIPS).  These are hour long sessions to which staff are welcome for any length of time to discuss the topic of the session, or get help trying something out. The name “DIPS” complements our Bite(s) of Learning series, which will continue and for which ARCS is already arranging some exciting Spring offerings.  

On the horizon

Anthology, the new student information system that will replace Jenzabar CX and the current portal, is scheduled to launch in July 2026.  There will be a new portal built on a system called Pathify, and we intend to do a “soft launch” of the portal in the Spring.  One big improvement is that staff will now have access to the new system, and it will eventually function as a central hub for all of HMC’s digital services. It will be the home for many internal college documents that are currently on the main hmc.edu website. 

HMC has been providing automated account provisioning for more than a decade now, allowing us to quickly create accounts in many systems when new people arrive (including cross registered students).  We are simplifying the current system, moving many elements to Microsoft EntraID.  This in turn will pave the way for automated account creation in many more of our systems and for reliable account deletion.

I hope you enjoyed reading this update.  As always, we would love to hear your comments and ideas. 

Happy Thanksgiving from all at CIS!